George Bernard Shaw Quotes
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You are my inspiration and my folly. You are my light across the sea, my million nameless joys, and my day's wage. You are my divinity, my madness, my selfishness, my transfiguration and purification. You are my rapscallionly fellow vagabond, my tempter and star. I want you.
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Most people go to their grave with their music inside them.
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Life at its noblest leaves mere happiness far behind; and indeed cannot endure it. Happiness is not the object of life: life has no object: it is an end in itself; and courage consists in the readiness to sacrifice happiness for an intenser quality of life.
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Never fret for an only son, the idea of failure will never occur to him.
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What right has any human being to talk of bringing up a child? You do not bring up a tree or a plant. It brings itself up. You have to give it a fair chance by tilling the soil.
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The whole world is strewn with snares, traps, gins and pitfalls for the capture of men by women.
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We should all be obliged to appear before a board every five years and justify our existence... on pain of liquidation.
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Martyrdom: The only way a man can become famous without ability.
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The greatest thing in life is to die young - but delay it as long as possible.
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A part of eugenic politics would finally land us in an extensive use of the lethal chamber. A great many people would have to be put out of existence simply because it wastes other people's time to look after them.
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You don't learn to hold your own in the world by standing on guard, but by attacking, and getting well hammered yourself.
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I was a cannibal for twenty-five years. For the rest I have been a vegetarian. It was Shelley who first opened my eyes to the savagery of my diet.
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Communism, being the lay form of Catholicism, and indeed meaning the same thing, has never had any lack of chaplains.
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The moment we face it frankly we are driven to the conclusion that the community has a right to put a price on the right to live in it ... If people are fit to live, let them live under decent human conditions. If they are not fit to live, kill them in a decent human way. Is it any wonder that some of us are driven to prescribe the lethal chamber as the solution for the hard cases which are at present made the excuse for dragging all the other cases down to their level, and the only solution that will create a sense of full social responsibility in modern populations?
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In a stupid nation the man of genius becomes a god: everybody worships him and nobody does his will.
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Without music we shall surely perish of drink, morphia, and all sorts of artificial exaggerations of the cruder delights of the senses.
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That is what all poets do: they talk to themselves out loud; and the world overhears them. But it's horribly lonely not to hear someone else talk sometimes.
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The thought of two thousand people crunching celery at the same time horrified me.
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The ability to make witty observations is commonly refered to as "cynism" by people who lack it.
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The person I miss most is the one I could have been.
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Eternal is the fact that the human creature born in Ireland and brought up in its air is Irish. I have lived for twenty years in Ireland and for seventy-two in England; but the twenty came first and in Britain I am still a foreigner and shall die one.
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My way hither was the way of destiny; for I am he of whose genius you are the symbol: part brute, part woman, and part God - nothing of man in me at all. Have I read your riddle, Sphinx?
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What we call education and culture is for the most part nothing but the substitution of reading for experience, of literature for life, of the obsolete fictitious for the contemporary real.
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Why, except as a means of livelihood, a man should desire to act on the stage when he has the whole world to act in, is not clear to me.